VPx

VPx is a family of digital video compression formats originally developed by On2 Technologies and later advanced by Google. The x in VPx stands for the version number, with well-known members including VP3, VP4, VP5, VP6, VP7, VP8 and VP9. VP8, released by Google after acquiring On2 in 2010, became the first widely used VPx codec and was published as royalty-free as part of the WebM project. VP9, introduced in 2013, offered substantially better compression efficiency and higher-quality at similar bitrates, supporting resolutions up to 4K and beyond.

Technical overview: VPx codecs employ block-based motion compensation, intra- and inter-frame prediction, transform coding and entropy coding. Over successive generations, VP8 and VP9 added more prediction modes, larger block sizes and more efficient coding to improve compression and streaming performance. They are designed to be implemented in software and hardware, with the WebM container often used to carry VPx video in web applications.

Adoption and use: The VPx family became a cornerstone of the WebM open media ecosystem and achieved widespread browser support in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, as well as many media players. The codecs are generally distributed under permissive, royalty-free licenses as part of WebM, encouraging broad adoption for web video.

Current status: In the 2020s, newer formats such as AV1 have emerged as higher-efficiency successors, and many deployments have migrated toward AV1. Nevertheless, VP9 remains in active use and continues to be supported in WebM workflows and hardware decoders.